


White Queen, Black Knight

by deepandlovelydark, Tanista



Series: Second Chances [34]
Category: MacGyver (TV 1985)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Assassins & Hitmen, Espionage, Spies & Secret Agents, Uncle-Niece Relationship, great game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 12:31:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13007841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanista/pseuds/Tanista
Summary: Two players in the Great Game make their own moves, separately and together.





	White Queen, Black Knight

**Author's Note:**

> The result of some email back and forthing...Some dialogue adapted from the pilot episode. For fun, naturally.

_It's a great huge game of chess that's being played- all over the world...I wouldn't mind being a Pawn, if only I might join- though of course I should like to be a Queen, best._

_-Alice, Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll_

She shields her eyes as the DXS helicopter lands on the beach by her Gulf Coast home. A middle-aged agent climbs out, the wind whipping his tie to one side.

There goes her much-needed vacation. Something somewhere has gone terribly wrong, else he wouldn't be here.

"Hi, Gant. Please, tell me you were just in a hurry to see me and there's no bad news."

"Okay. I was just in a hurry to see you and I'll save the bad news 'til we get inside."

Unlike plenty of people in this business, he has a sense of humour; one of the reasons she’s always stuck by her first handler. (Humour, and loyalty, and the Department of External Services may not be perfect, but at some level, government departments have to stay accountable. Unlike, say, rogue think tanks.)

Gant lays out the details for her, with his brief briskness: classified research gone wrong in New Mexico, explosions that have trapped two top scientists in an underground bunker.

“They calculate the chances of anyone getting through to them is...well, it's not great."

"Give me 'not great' on a scale of one to ten."

"Minus three."

She winces. Yeah, it's __that__ bad.

"That's why we couldn't order anyone to try. So your name came up."

"Out of all the agents on your payroll? What other options do they have?"

He looks down at her uncomfortably.

"I'm it, aren't I?"

"You're it. Look, you don't have to take this assignment, you know that. But there's no one else that can get down there through the wreckage and see what's going on like you can."

Well, this is what she signed up for, isn't it? A chance to make a difference.

"Call the lab, Gant. Tell them we're on our way."

*******************

Family and friends call her Becky. Her work-name’s the Innocent Spy. One for casual, one for best: but which is which?

She wonders herself, some days.

*******************

In Moscow, a junior FSB agent quizzes his mentor over drinks.

"But how is it she's called Innocent? Who would play the Great Game with a sense of morality?"

The older man touches the chilled glass to his lips, taps the photo in her dossier. "Consider. That petite exterior, those unassuming glasses...this is a clerk, you say to yourself. A backroom analyst."

"Or just a civilian asset," the junior agent says, with a definite smirk. “Sweet. Mild mannered.”

"And you will be beaten every time, if you don’t learn better than to judge by appearances,” his superior rebukes. “Disarming you literally as well as figuratively."

Another sip of vodka.

"A little joke, at first. Now? The name is a warning."

*******************

Every so often, some paper-pusher at Century House asks Ashton Cooke to explain her American friend’s odd method of troubleshooting, for duplication or extrapolation. They never ask twice, though the MI-6 agent offers her guesses with a smile.

"A kind of genius for thinking outside the box, that's simply how she does things. Everything around her is a tool. She looks at the world, and sees solutions to problems before they've even happened.”

“Her way of stepping into the gap, so to speak. The art of applied nonviolence- she doesn’t have that crutch to lean on. How might we do, without it?”

"Runs in her family. A relative with a taste for inventing, until a patent lawsuit took the heart out of him- she still talks about his environmentally-efficient impeller. I think I can guess who it was.”

Then tell us that, at least, the paper-pusher says. Give us some leverage over this unpredictable woman.

"We have quite a lot in common,” Ashton always says, “and I can't help but wish her well in the Game. Try someone else."

They do, but never get an answer.

********************

A Mossad operative and her partner converse during a stakeout in Damascus.

"Is it true she carries no weapons whatsoever? No guns?"

"A knife," he says, slapping in the clip of his 9mm. "A toy at that, a Swiss army knife she uses for a calling card. Not even lethal. Though the weapon isn’t so important, when you’re quick enough to take down an opponent twice your size."

"That knife sounds familiar,” the woman says, with all the relish of a child telling ghost stories. “What they say about a certain freelancer...an imaginative assassin who needs no guns, to build his ingenious and deadly traps. Mentored by the legendary Murdoc himself, if any of it’s true."

“Perhaps you’d like to ask him yourself, the next time the Phoenix Foundation orders an intervention...they say he earned the position, by killing the agent ordered to find him. Bloodthirsty, these Americans.”

“The same knife, but playing on opposite sides of the Game,” the female operative muses. "I wonder what would happen if they met."

********************

A knife flicks out, sharp and sure of its target.

A well-aimed throw neatly deflects it, sending the blade into a nearby post.

She turns to the Serbian military officer, still in shock over the near miss. "There are agents outside the back door, they'll see you safely across the Romanian border by nightfall. Your family's there, waiting in the refugee camp on the other side. After that, you'll all be escorted to The Hague, where you can testify against your superiors before the International War Crimes Tribunal."

The defector doesn't need to be told how lucky he is, escaping certain death. He nods and leaves, quickly, while she studies her opponent.

Angus MacGyver. Though he prefers just MacGyver, and these days she’s the only one allowed to call him Mac.

(They haven’t seen each other for several months. Her twenty-third birthday, his treat to her in Paris.)

The imaginative assassin; but he’s still her uncle.

He cocks his head, smirking slightly. "Hey, sweetheart."

Old habits die hard. "Hey, Unc. How's tricks?"

"Been busy. Can't complain." He pulls out the knife, tucking it back into its sheaf under his black leather jacket. "How about you?"

"The same. You know how it is."

"Yeah. Heard you're making a name for yourself."

"So are you."

They each take a step forward. Dust swirls in the afternoon sunlight, in the abandoned Belgrade warehouse.

He gently touches her hair. "I miss you," he says, softly.

"I miss you too." She takes his larger hand in hers, pressing a kiss into the palm, feeling the calloused fingers tenderly cup her cheek.

The hard look in his dark eyes softens. He remembers long, bright summer days in Oregon spent imagining a kingdom together, when she was a child.

Her blue eyes moisten. She recalls long, dark winter nights in Minnesota spent snuggling together under her handmade quilts, when she was a teenager.

They pull each other into a warm embrace.

Someone yelps, on the ground floor below them. Her fellow agents must be making their way through the traps he'd laid out on the way here.

"Home for Christmas?" he murmurs into her ear.

"Course. I never did pick up your knack for roasting turkey."

"All you need is a little practice. You’ll get there.” A touch of dryness in his tone, and she knows he isn’t just talking about cooking. He’s always waiting to see if she’ll take up with his methods. She always refuses.

"Give my love to Jack, when you get home."

"Will do. See you later, Becky."

"See you later, Uncle Mac."

He kisses her on the cheek, as the agents storm up the stairs; by the time they enter, he’s long since gone.

After debriefing outside, she slips a hand inside her jacket to touch a familiar pocket knife. She rubs a finger along the engraved words on the handle: _For B, with love from M._

So much has changed since that fateful April day, years ago. When he escaped from Mission City, in the company of Murdoc. Leaving her and his best friend Jack Dalton behind, to make their own flight a little later.

Their lives have taken wildly divergent paths since then. He takes lives, and she saves them, and somehow they’re both still alive. (The Phoenix Foundation's top agents are strangely mute on the subject.)

But some things haven't changed.

They still have each other, and a certain sense of connection.

No matter what happens in the course of playing the Great Game, they'll always be family.


End file.
